Dwarkesh Podcast - Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Today I talk to Pradyu Prasad (blogger and podcaster) about the book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" by Herbert P. Bix. We also discuss militarization, industrial capacity, current events, and blogging. Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Podcast website here.Follow Pradyu on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Follow Pradyu's Blog: https://brettongoods.substack.com/ Timestamps:(0:00:00) - Intro (0:01:59) - Hirohito and Introduction to the Book (0:05:39) - Meiji Restoration and Japan's Rapid Industrialization (0:11:11) - Industrialization and Traditional Military Norms (0:14:50) - Alternate Causes for Japanese Atrocities Richard Hanania's Public Choice Theory in Imperial Japan (0:17:03)(0:21:34) - Hirohito's Relationship with the Military (0:24:33) - Rant of Japanese Strategy (0:33:10) - Modern Parallel to Russia/Ukraine (0:38:22) - Economics of War and Western War Capacity (0:48:14) - Elements of Effective Occupation (0:55:53) - Ideological Fervor in WW2 Japan (0:59:25) - Cynicism on Elites(1:00:29) - The Legend of Godlike Hirohito (1:06:47) - Postwar Japanese Economy(1:13:23) - Blogging and Podcasting (1:20:31) - Spooky (1:38:00) - Outro Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton! Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

Okay, today I had the pleasure speaking with Pradoumna Prasad about the book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Vicks. Pradu is an incredibly smart young guy. He has a blog and a podcast called Bread and Goods, which you can find at bretongoods. That's substack.com. Just some context in the last quarter of the conversation, we are discussing our budding blogs. and podcasts and that discussion was recorded before the crazy events of the last week or two happened.

But, you know, it might give you some interesting window into how we were thinking about these projects of ours before, you know, the crazy shit started happening. But yeah, I hope you enjoy and thanks for watching. Cool. Right. Today, have the pleasure of speaking with Pradjumna Prasad, who is recently graduated high school in Singapore and now he just received an emergent ventures grant very recently to continue work on his great podcast and blog excellent excellent so yeah you got the emergent ventures grant what are your plans what are you doing what I'm gonna do with it I at the moment I'm working on a bunch of stuff on reserve currencies it was it has been an obsession of mine for a very long

time. So it's all the all the reading is going to end up in writing at some point. On the longer term, I want to have a blog where I can answer every single economic history question or economics question I don't know the answer to and nobody else has the answer to I can answer it here. So pretty much going to be a mini encyclopedia of questions I'm interested in. Excellent, excellent. Okay, yeah, I'm looking forward to what to produce. Today we're discussing this book you recommended to me, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix. And so just to give a little bit of context. Well, actually, let's just say who Hirohito was, right? He was the Japanese emperor. He was the third emperor after the after I mean third emperor after the Meiji Restoration. He was the first one to see Japan as an international power.

He was the first and last one to handle it as an international power. And yeah, Hito Hito was a guy responsible for a lot of stuff that happened in East Asia across the mid-20th century. Right, including by the way, World War II, right? Right. So he was a Japanese emperor during World War II. And there's a big controversy around Hirohito because he was in charge of Japan during the time. that Japan invaded China and committed all of the atrocities that we know, we know happened there, including the rape in Namping.

And he was also the Japanese emperor during World War II, during Pearl Harbor, obviously. So the book takes a very critical stance on Hirohito. It claims that Hirohito could have stopped or at least in many ways dulled these atrocities. He had that authority. the opposite view, I guess, which is a conventional view, is that Hirohito was kind of a constitutional monarch, much like a British monarch, and that he didn't really have the authority to intervene in politics. And then to the extent that he did, he did his utmost to like lessen the impacts of the war, for example, by surrendering in 1945. So now what were your

overall impressions of the book of how well he did, defending the ceases that Hirohito should have been tried as a war criminal. I think the book sort of goes like a synthesis. of these two and say that Hirihito was a constitutional monarch, but he was a constitutional monarch because he chose to be a constitutional monarch. So yeah, he, he, he, he, he, he, in theory, on paper, he couldn't do it. It's, it's, it's one of those things where, um, Japanese constitutional law wasn't very well done. I mean, it, for any, uh, anocracy, constitutional law isn't well done, done, and much more so for Japan, but, uh, Hiroito could have done something he did not. He chose to be a constitutional monarch.

So anyways, the book was well written towards the end, poorly written towards the start. I think the difference between a collection of events and a biography is a story, and there was no story at the start. So I think that probably could have been much improved. But I also think that it's very hard to find people who read through original language sources, in this case Japanese and a very small extent, Chinese and English. and then put it into English.

But I think the author deserves a lot of commendation for that. Okay, excellent. Yeah, yeah. So I agree. The most interesting part about the beginning, and I agree, it was pretty dull, was the author talking about how much the Hirohito was influenced by his grandfather Meiji. So, you know, like Meiji was the emperor during the time where Japan rapidly, rapidly, rapidly industrialized. and kind of became a went from being a kind of like a semi-colonized power to becoming a colonial power itself, you know, having colonies in Korea and Taiwan under Meiji.

So it's very interesting. You know, I have friends who kind of think that I have one friend who thinks that many of the differences you see between countries can be explained largely by genetic differences. And I think one of the strongest, like, counterarguments of that is just like how different Japan has been over like the last 150 years, like how many different evolutions has gone through. And whenever you see these stories of rapid industrialization, it's just very like, you can kind of understand how it can happen over many hundreds of years. How it happens in the case of Japan during the major restoration so fast, it kind of sons me. So I know you've been doing a lot of reading on Chinese industrialization as well, as well as like industrialization and many rapid operations. in many other East Asian countries. Can you explain what happened during the major restoration? Like how did they get everything up and running so fast? Right. The main difference between the pre-1868 Japan, which is the worst called the

Tokugwa Shogunate and the Meiji era was that Japan had a lot more centralized power. There was one king running the place instead of feudal laws all over. Japan was a lot more open to the rest of the world, you know. There was the death penalty for Japanese who interacted outside of Japan during Gakwa Shoggi. It's very very brutal in today's words. And Japan basically did what would be called the holy trinity of industrialization. It had open labor markets, government, investment, and basically allowed foreign capital to come in. And so across East Asia and across parts of Africa like Botswana and to a smaller extent,

South Africa and Nigeria, the best way to get a race historically for countries, when they're already the other rich countries, is to take all capitals from the rich countries, copy their innovations, and use all their knowledge on how to get rich, to get rich yourself, and then start to slowly push away on their hegemony. And the results of it are somewhat mixed. The U.S. did okay as well. Japan didn't do well, and we're seeing it with China now. Is there any particular reason it happened first in Japan as far as these Asian countries go? I mean, okay, that is, I'm not a, I'm not a very good source on this because I try to avoid the

the historicity of this because it's full of too many details. Historians haven't done a very good job of it. But my take on it is that I think it's very much elite dependent as in the first is that. the Japanese elite didn't have as much of a then-seeking class as the Chinese elite did. You know, in China, because the country was so big, they invented a whole bureaucracy to administer it. The problem was you end up leaving too much power to the people in between you and the general public. So they ended up being sort of the barriers to modernizing and opening up. But in Japan, that was less so. The second thing is Japan already had

a small tradition of worshipping the emperor's god and became politically convenient for the shogunate to now reemerge they actually had a small civil war and the it's so happened and this just an accident of luck that the winners of the civil war happened to be the ones who wanted to open up and make japan great again so uh one part is that the second thing is being a small island nation really um makes you see the realities of life much easier one explanation provides small countries would have better economic policy than large countries, is that if you're a small country, the realities of life are very often more in your face. So when Japanese elite saw the American ships coming, they're like, whoops, you know, we can't afford to be irrational

anymore about it, and they were forced to modernize. Compare that to a lot of East Asia, where they either could live in their own alternate reality, for example, Indian kings and the Qing dynasty in China, you know, the Japanese were just forced to deal with reality a lot faster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I also read on your recommendation, Lee Kanyu's biography. And so this is not the book we're discussing now.

But just to tie it with this, it was really interesting to read him just go over all the different issues Singapore had to deal with at when it got started. You know, the fact that it had hostile neighbors, the fact that basically it was going to lose like 25% of the GDP

when the British left for their naval basis. And there's something about the fact that you're just like on an island, you know, open to any sort of open to all the elements, basically, that I guess concentrates the mind. Exactly.

A very underrated measure of leader competence is how close to reality are you? And you see it, like to skip to 2022 today, right? You saw it over the last two years where leaders were more in touch with reality, respond faster to COVID, got better vaccines, tightened up faster, but also opened up faster. So basically the Japanese elite in the 1860s was a lot more in touch with reality than other countries. And so they knew they were forced to open up. And the next part of it was they opened up and they opened up quick. They got American industries to come set up in Japan.

And basically a lot of the history of economic development is also the history of intellectual piracy. It just had had what is euphemistically called forced technology transfers so they can learn how to make all the Fulgats that the Americans had. And by around the 1910 and 1920s, they got rich enough to project their power onto the rest of East Asia. By 1905, they fought a war with Russia. And then in, you know, in 1950, around the same time they invaded China and then later

they made China again. They just didn't deal with the sudden transitions of being a power that was coerced by the Americans by two of our coercing other countries. Right. Now, I mean, there's a way you can view this where, I don't know, if you have that kind of transition happens slowly in a country, you can have norms evolve from, I don't know how to put this in a way that's not derogatory, but norms that are very kind of brutish and very much geared towards like traditional norms of war, which is like, you destroy the enemy, you pillage and you loot, which is like, which might make sense if you can like loot a village, right? But when you're talking about the capacity in modernism, you know, of war and you can do that to like millions of people, that can become extremely brutal. And I don't know, it seems like in the West, once industrialization happened, there was like enough time for things to simmer down before these countries were introduced to the worst weapons. And you could argue that the World Wars are a counter example, but even still, on the, on the,

on the Eastern theaters, sorry, I mean, the Western theater, the, the, the, there just weren't the kind of atrocities that, you saw the Japanese make in the Pacific theater and in China. So, like, one of the downsides of rapid industrialization is your cultural norms don't catch up to your technology. And so you have like almost these, these people who have like very, very traditional norms around war with very modern weapons. And it gets pretty scary. Another girl of scholar's stage is a very good essay on honor culture, which is the spec, which is justice. I'm paraphrasing here. But overall, let's industrialized societies have strong patriarchal cultures because for better or worse it's the men

who ended up doing the work and they got more of the respect and there's a lot of debate and literature about this but that's more or less my understanding of it right so you're right that the norms don't catch up but i think you're wrong that even in the west the norms didn't catch up for a long time right think of colonialism only very very few people in the house of commons thought they should impeach one Hastings for his atrocities in East India through the East India company. So it's not only in Japan that Norms didn't catch up. It's almost everywhere that norms did catch up. Norms take a lot of time to catch up.

And in Japan, well, the first thing is that the Japan you see today is mostly is artificial in the sense that it is an artifact of the Americans jumping in and putting a gun to the Japanese cabinet and saying you better accept the constitution we make. And some parts of the Japanese left really liked it. Some parts didn't. But they basically forced a coalition of only people who liked it and people, people from the old regime who were willing to accept the new reality. So norms can change quick, but when they do, they change with the battle of a gun, not by some internal organic class. Asked a question of why was there so much atrocity? You are correct in saying that norms didn't change, but I also think that public choice theory is what explains a lot

of Japanese war crimes across the 1900s, I mean, the entire early 20th century, right? My entire understanding of the book was that it could have been written by any public choice theorist and would have ended up the same. So let's think of it this way. The Japanese army was powerful historically from the 1860s. They fought a war in 1905. They were always scared in Soviet Union after a reform was going to invade them as historical vengeance, also because it was just a lot better run than the tallest Russia. The problem was the depression hit, and then the army and Navy got mad that their spending was cut. They just kept inventing problems in East Asia for them to have their budget increased. And some part of inventing problems involved in a

involves lying about them. All all allow bureaucracies exaggerate their problems. But the army took the more extreme step of creating problems itself. And then, like, we created this mess and we need money to solve it. Or else you're going to die. And then the Japanese government was weak enough to give them money and got drawn into World War II. Yeah. So let me just, let me just like fill in the details for the audience.

So in 1931, in a Japanese. controlled Manchuria, the Japanese military stages the sort of attack on one of their real roads, if I remember correctly. And it's like pretty obvious as staged by the military. It's not even that big of an attack. Sorry, it's staged by the Japanese military. And it doesn't cause major damage, but the military then uses that justification to invade the rest of China without permission from the emperor or the rest of the civilian government. But yeah, so basically what you have, And then so public choice here comes in because you have like these political factions in Japan who are like trying to control the Japanese policy, not in the best interest of Japan itself, but because of what they're, what is in the best interest of themselves as the faction. In fact, I interviewed Richard Henania recently on my podcast. And as you know, he has a book out called public choice area and the illusion of grand strategy where it makes exactly this point where he's arguing that the unitary actor model does not apply to nation states.

because they're very influenced by these sorts of factions and individuals and special interest groups, like, for example, the military in the military and then specifically the imperial wave faction in Japan. But so there's many examples of this where like Army officers just like kill the prime minister at one point. And I think it was 1936. And when they go to trial, they just say, yeah, we did this for it because we're like loyal to the emperor. And the prime minister was, you know, he wasn't nationalistic enough. and they get like very light sentences. So you, you know, it's called the government by assassination,

what the government was like at this time. I agree. A few things here, right? The first thing is that Japan had a very unique constitutional model, as far as it could be called a constitutional model, which is just ad hoc as, you know, a big problem in people's understanding of history is that they don't, they just don't realize

that a lot of times big events are just some guy deciding things. And so a lot of these things end up exactly as you would expect some guy who ended up deciding them. And so the big problem here is that, well, the way the Japanese constitution was designed was that the civilian government, elected by men with topity or don't remember the exact details, they had control only over every part of the government except the military. And most countries, like in the U.S., you have a requirement that all defense secretaries should not have served in the military or if they have served, there has to be some, I think, a five year or a seven year gap to ensure that you have civilian control on the military, right?

Wait, but. The Fed secretaries can't have served in the military? No, no. You have to have a five year gap or something. And if you don't meet that gap, you have to get a waiver from Congress. Okay. Yeah, okay. I didn't know that.

Okay. So that's to maintain civilian control on the military. And a lot of countries don't do very well on that, right? go on sort of a tangent. Pakistan is one of those places where you're very poor civilian control on the military. The military just keeps like doing stuff and the government is forced to react to it. Then in most Western democracy, it's the other way around. The crazy president does something and the military's like, whoops, now we're in this war and we've got to deal with it. In Japan, the problem was your army ministers were well part of the army. They weren't representing the civilian government.

They were representing the army. Give an example. It's a funny. thing. The Indian ambassador, so in the 1960s, India was having a, was having high tensions with China, which ended up in a war in 1962. I think it was VK. Men and was India's ambassador to China. And you know, VK. Man came and told Nehru, you know, this happened, that happened. Chinese won this and Chinese won that. And Nero asks him quite annoyed, are you our ambassador to them or are you their ambassador to us? And it's the same problem with the army minister being part of the army. Is he representing the civilian garment or the army? Nobody knows. And that led to a sort of elite capture of the civilian garment by the army. There's another great book. I forgot

the title, but it was discussed on China talk a lot. And basically explains that the army took control of the entire civilian government basically said, you got to prepare for total war. Why? Because we said so. And they reorganize the functions of government a lot to achieve this objective. Yeah, yeah. There's like a pretty well-known quote about the Pakistani military, which can be applied equally as well to Japan in this era, which is that in most countries, the government has a military in Pakistan. And I guess in this case, Japan, the military has the government, right? Yeah, no, no. That's what's playing into here. And now the claim of the author is that at various points where the military power is growing

and it's doing more audacious things. It's like directly contradicting the will of the civilian government. The civilian government says, like, hey, what are you doing, like invading these other parts of China? Like, you know, stop this. And the military leaders are just like, yeah, fuck it, we're going in. And so at this point, the, um, um, Bix is like, the author, he's like, um, the emperor who's Because like he has a unique role here where he has such moral authority because the army is claiming to like in the US It's not like if there was as if there is a sort of like military coup

Assuming the president's not in favor of it the government the army military is not going to be like we're doing this in the name of the president right Whereas in Japan it was like well we for the glory of the emperor and the empire where you know we're gonna invade So the bix is like yeah you could have just been like yeah this is not in my name right and he doesn't do that he he issues like these very mild if at all condemnations whenever these kinds of things happen. And so they keep escalating and escalating. And so yeah. Yeah, so a few things about that, right? So a lot of it, there's a question in waiting about history is how much of it is

contingent on structural forces and how much of it is contingent on actual people. And foreign policy is one of the three places. This is all history where things are contingent on actual people. And one of those actual people was Hirohito. The problem with Hirohito was that even as a child, he was very mild-mannered. His tutors described him as, you know, he wouldn't win any debates. He wasn't a very good public speaker. And the Japanese government and Japanese state, very different than Japanese government,

was very concerned that the public support for the emperor was going down. So they went to it. So they went to England to learn how England did it. And the problem was that, you know, Hito was not the right person for this job, because the job demanded a little closer to what a modern-day politician's job demands, a lot of public opinion formation, a lot of, I put it, dealing with various factions inside and, you know, lying to a lot of people and keeping them quiet. But he or Hito was just not politically swave enough to do it.

And that was the clear problem here was that he didn't understand, even if he understood, he didn't understand clearly the level of impact he had. And he had this personal team's mindset of, like, we've probably linked to this. He had this personal team's mindset of like, it's not worth it. But then, you know, that's what led to his downfall in the end. To what extent was Hirohito responsible for this? My answer is, it depends on your definition of responsible. Could he have stopped it?

Probably. Could he have lessened it? Definitely. Could he have led to have it have lesser, have it have a less stupid direction off the water, right? One of my biggest beliefs is that the entirety of Japanese military strategy across the World War was completely stupid. They were shooting themselves in the head. I'm going to go on a rant here, if that's fine with you.

Yeah, please do. Okay, so basically, Japan was really, really scared of a war with the Soviet Union. For all these reasons, they're their largest neighbor, and they were getting richer under Lenin and Stalin, because, you know, transformations of agriculture to industry, has been made every single country, which, okay? The problem was Japan was smaller with lesser people, and obviously they would have lesser ammunition and military power to do. a war. So Japanese war planning said, okay, we're going to plan for a war with the Soviet Union.

Naturally, if you're going to plan for a war with the Soviet Union, you should plan for a war with the Soviet Union. You should not plan for a war with China or with the Philippines or America or with Malaya, right? But what they did in the 1930s was they said, oh, we have this and public choice problems forced them into entering China. And so, you know, the Japanese army wanted to be relevant to Japanese Navy, maybe weren't to be relevant. We just kept like nudging, provoking the Chinese into attacking them. So what the original plan was we will use our assets in Manchuria to fight the Soviet Union. And we need and we need Manchuria because to protect our assets in Korea,

a sort of early 20th century version of Domino theory. And then they did that. I'm sorry, just sure enough up with the audience. Manchuria is this region in China and like the Northeast. Yeah, in the Northeast of China. Yeah. Korea. Yeah, it's very rich in iron and minerals and so on.

And the little plan was that they would use their resources in Manchuria for doing it. So why did they want to use their resources in Montreal in general? The answer is that Japanese military planners saw this demodel. They built their government. The government did the entire thing, including trade policy and everything, was Imperial Germany. The problem was Imperial Germany, lost World War. once. So they, did this entire sort of like self or reflection period, why did they lose World War I? The answer was, in PEO, Germany, really never had the resources to win World War I. They're

located by the, by the British and so on, right? So there answer was, we're going to get Manchuria and we're going to use it said, any future wars, we don't, we don't lose it. Finally, if you don't want to lose any future wars, a good way of not losing wars is to not get into ones you can't win. And so, but they didn't do that. They just walked into Japan. That was mistake number one. The problem with walking into into into into into into into into China in the 1930s I said Japan or my dad. Problem with with walking into China in 1930s is that it's a it's a it's a it's a why that pisses off a lot of people right. So I hear it

me too much of modern Japan mentions it. The Americans were quite outraged by it because it was the what would be called the neutral China principle all colonial powers would be completely fair in in using Chinese resources for their own industrialization. you know, a very morally poor thing to say, but that's how morality was back there, like whatever, okay? And so the point was this pissed off the Americans and the British and the French and, you know, that it's useful to have powerful friends, especially when your end goal is world domination, right? So they did that. And then the problem is you can't really,

China doesn't have much oil Japan doesn't have much oil and all that all was imported from the US. All their atrocities in China led to very bad publicity in the US American public opinion on China, especially because the answer historically for governments

has been don't piss off the church too much. And Japanese governments didn't know about that because they were their version of the church. But the Japanese atrocities in East China led to American missionies. missionaries in China, going to America and reporting it to the American public. The American

public got very outraged by it. So by the 1930s, you had this sort of like mini movement among the more religious people saying, we should not have American resources involved in the Japanese pillage of China. And so there was a lot of domestic pressure on the American end trying to stop them. Japan, so mistake number two was pissing off the Americans, right? The problem with pissing off the Americans almost all the time is that almost all of Japanese all imports came from America, right? Saudi Arabia wasn't a thing back then. So all of Japanese all imports came from America. It's like 97% or something like that. Yeah, yeah. In the high 90s. And it's not like wanted to make synthetic oil, but that didn't work very well. The history of like

countries thinking they can make their own oil. It's kind of money because Denchaping almost like 30, 40 years after this thing told his cabinet that China would finance its industrialization because it had some oil plans and it kind of didn't work out because you know, it didn't have resources to make oil which China and you didn't have and Japan didn't have it at that point of time. Anyways, that aside, that aside aside, you basically have mistake number two was pissing off the U.S. And so, Tiroito, you know, to what extent was the emperor responsible for this?

I don't, here's where I will put my structural hat on and tell you that, you know, Hito was not prepared to deal with these challenges. The first thing was no country had ever dealt with total war before in East Asia, right? Wars used to happen in East Asia, obviously, but there was sort of like the European wars before World War I. You send a few people to fight it and you, and you fight it down, you can lose, well, it sucks. but you never mobilized your entire economy. There was a new type of war, which he didn't know of, you could model it, but the guy wasn't kind of smart, you know, he wasn't the sharpest tool in the, in the shed. So he really wasn't prepared to model this sort of war.

Huh. I mean, wasn't the Taiping rebellion, like one of the deadliest things in history or something like that? Yeah. It's like a civil war, but. It's a civil war, but the difference between a conventional war, war and a civil war in a conventional war, the toping rebellion didn't have much organization. It was just people going and killing each other. There's no ammunition factory that said this month we're going to make X,000 guns because the soldiers need to fight it. Compared that to World

War II, you know, you had the price, you had a bunch of lots of economic planning in the, in the U.S. successfully managed to say, we have to make these many guns and these many bombs to fight the German and Japanese, right? But that sort of thing. was very underdeveloped in a very different aside a big problem with having your in in not having high level manufacturing like america had with automobiles is that you don't in one time what is useful is being able to coordinate large amounts of resources to their desired purpose and people like people make the joke that that amazon and walmart essentially planned economies and it's So it's totally off a joke because in the World War II, when the U.S. needed central planning, it didn't go to the Department of Commerce.

It went to Ford and GM and said, we have like a five times bigger version of you and we need your managers to run this because you're the only people who know how to. But Japan didn't have that type of experience. The Japanese planning board, you know, it talks about the biggest problems. Supplies didn't come. And like, is he really responsible for this? And he didn't hit it in the end. the answer is responsible, but also because the guy couldn't do it. He didn't have the tools to do it.

And the reasons for that, I'm much deeper than Hirohito himself, is that if you read through the first part of the book, Hilhito didn't have much of an education in economics or science or, I mean, science for a small extent because it was considered a noble subject, or engineering, right? If you ask them a question, which the answer to which I learned in Seventry, how do you expect Ireland? He probably wouldn't know it. He wouldn't be able to think to model through those things.

So the problem was no economy was prepared for a total war because they'd never done it before. But Japan was the first country to say, yeah, let's do it. And they pay the price for it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you bring up the, you're bringing a pissing up America. I think so we picked this war before the Ukraine we picked this book before the Ukraine thing happened but people have been making this analogy so we might as well talk about it so as you know that people are making this analogy between Ukraine

today the decision in Ukraine today and know what was happening with China and Japan before World War II so the idea is that what happened with Japan was they invaded China they did all these atrocities they invaded different parts of Indochina and this was stuff America so I'm America embargoed iron, steel, copper, and most importantly, oil exports to Japan. They froze their assets in the US, which basically prevented it from buying oil. And the Japanese war machine required oil. So then basically Japan decided, we're going to have to invade other parts of Indochina to get this oil.

But to do that, we're going to need to, we're going to need to invade America's sphere of influence, like places like the Philippines. And to do that, we're probably going to first need to disable America's ability. to wage war in the Pacific. And to do that, we're going to add a bomb per of harbor. So the analogy goes that what we're doing with Russia is similar in the sense that we're, you know, just as Japan invaded China and we responded, the U.S. responded back then. Russia has invaded Ukraine and we're responding very strongly with sanctions now. And maybe Russia feels like it's going to become backed up in a corner and therefore it decides

to launch like a conventional attack against, I don't know, NATO headquarters in Europe or something. And from there, you have an all-out war. So what do you think of this analogy? Do you think it's valid or applicable? They'd be very stupid to do that. But historically, Putin's actions have been more stupider. So you can't model him to your natural actor model. To what extent does the analogy apply?

Too much less extent. The first thing is Russia can. Actually, it does apply, but in a different way. Russia is dependent on the Western world. not in terms of oil, they have a lot of their themselves, but in terms of things like, you know, dentists shops in Russia have shut down because the clouds and bitches and the sort of stuff you need to do to make fillings are made in Germany and the and the US. They really depend on the sort of like highly specialized small scale things.

And you can't find that outside the West. So yeah, are they going to have another war idea? Are they going to escalate it? Base rate say is very low. I'm going to go it slightly harder than a base rate, very low with small possibility. So does the analogy apply? Probably not. Japan was a militant country in the sense that you don't see the level of elite capture you had in Japan today in Russia.

Right. It just didn't exist back there, exist as it as it is now. So that's your first problem. But second problem is Russia wants Ukraine. And it knows through historical experience, right, Putin was your KGB left and colonel? He knows that what are the costs of a protracted level of a tank of military tension with the US? And it's very, very obvious to anyone watching here right now,

that if the EU decides to rearm and the US continues, it's current level of armament. I'm not in predicting a level of armament towards the 1980s, right? They will overpower Russia in every single margin. So will he do that? I don't think so. But I think the main objective right now for Western Poland's America should be get Putin to save face and back out without, you know, pushing into a corner. Are they going to push him into a corner?

I don't think so. It can be very bad for people living in Russia now. But so far, he's not as stupid as to go and invade Poland or Estonia or London. I literally go to the Netherlands and kill the NATO Secretary General. That would suck a lot because, well, it's World War III. I'm stuck in Singapore. I thought of halfway between the East and the West. That's for me.

But I doubt the analogy applies because they're not captured enough for the military for the rest of the government to care. Yeah, I mean, as far as the stupidity goes, you could continue the metaphor by saying that it was very stupid of Japan. people were saying this back then. I think I think Heroito said it himself, right? Which was like, listen, the U.S. has like a much higher GDP per capita. It even has a higher population.

So that the idea that we're going to be able to win a war against them is, you know, it's very stupid. And even if you like plan out everything, like we're going to have this offensive that in a few months, we're going to capture all these islands in the Pacific and we're going to destroy their Pacific fleet. Even then, it's like it was just such a, it was such a daring scheme. I don't know what it would have taken for the whole scheme to work. But, you know, so like, I don't know. I don't think we should underestimate the stupidity of nation states. I was doing some work on this last week.

Allied GDP was almost always greater than access GDP for the entire of the war, not counting colonies of either. And for a majority of the war, the allies, were had a GDP twice that of the access powers. So they were very stupid. It would be like what's a good analogy here? It would be like Denmark going to war with UK. Like maybe you'll maybe you'll capture a bit of Scotland. I swear to God once the UK starts with the army there's no way you can quit. Right. So you know reading this because I was looking at the same numbers earlier today or not the same but those kinds of numbers where like at the time

Japan had at 1935 it had a GDP per capita that was like almost a 10th of the US's and you know I was thinking about this and I was thinking about in the future like let's say it wasn't a 10th actually I'm not sure where you got a number but I have a book I open called the economy where to it's around 40% yeah US was 5,800 something Japan was 2007 and something that sounds very reasonable yeah yeah Okay, that makes sense. But it also had a bigger population, right? So it's a bigger total.

Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a dream that band is here. Yeah, yeah. So I was thinking about this, like with the potential that in the future, there's a conflict between the US and China. You know, like the analogy is like, oh, we have, we have a bigger current military. Like we've spent way more on the military now than China does. But if it has a higher industrial capacity, if it has a higher GDP, maybe in like a year or like a couple of months of conflict,

all these stuff you have so far is kind of useless. or, you know, like, it doesn't matter as much as your capacity as the U. as, I'm sorry, as the U.S. had during the World War II. It just like produced more stuff. Yeah, no. I agree. So to what extent, it would like that, I think the first thing is that in a short-term conflict, you would have the U.S. outmatched style in, like, every single thing, right?

Not because of the U.S., but it's U.S. plus EU. And the thing is, it's, so if you told somebody in 1922 and 100 years later, the EU is like what we call Europe today is disarmed. They will laugh at you. This is historically not the norm for European countries to not spend illogical amounts of their economy on defense, right? Because like they they fight a lot and now they're fighting a lot again. So it's a conflict prone continent. So basically, I find that very like the moment you attack the US, you are also more or less attacking with or without NATO, a lot of countries dependent on the US.

So a lot of those countries, so in a short-term conflict, you would obviously be depending on only American defense because only power ready to wage war in like 15 minutes time. But in a 15 months span, you would know other grouping of countries can match what the West has now just because the West is technologically superior. So maybe in the time span of like six months to 12 months, you would see a lot of Chinese advances.

But in the time span of 12 months plus, it would be very quick for the best to the arm. And, you know, because the Western sense of complacency about about about wars. All the wars that they fought on the Middle East, very far away, right? So the moment it starts hitting you, right? The moment you have bombs flying on their head, you're like, become a lot more real to people. So there's no question that you have a similar

scenario. UK plus EU US plus EU GDP is like $31 trillion and China plus Russia is like 40 trillion maybe I don't know, I'm just ballparking numbers here.

But China plus Russia GDP is like maybe 30 trillion. I can guarantee you this 40 trillion is a lot more productive than this 30 trillion because a lot of It's just, you know, for all the chaos that the American economy goes through, the chaos makes it more productive. So you're going to have, you have a lot less ghost cities and a lot less corruption on this end of the new Cold War. Yeah, I guess one concern is, I don't know how true.

This is I just heard from like the zeitgeist is the idea that we don't have the industrial capacity that we used to. So the GDP is higher, but it's the industrial capacity we've shipped elsewhere. I don't know how true that is. I think that industrial capacity is overrated, please. It's 22. First thing being, right, a lot of initial war is going to be very high tech. You've got to have underwater drones and like a- What is it?

It's exactly what it sounds like. It's an autonomous vehicle that's underwater. It's like a, you take a drone that can swim. Okay. It's a little bit what it sounds like, right? You have drone and then you have a lot of, satellite target, like, the satellites targeted for you and then you bomb them using the satellite imagery, right? Initially in the war, human intelligence is going to be very important. And now,

there been some pretty embarrassing parts for the US on this. Like, in 2015, there was a China, the Chinese hack of the DHS employee database. It was very embarrassing because, yeah, And then, you know, a lot of CIA actors in China mischiefly disappeared in the years after that. So, uh, sucks. But I also think that the industrial capacity argument goes like this. You know, America's outsource manufacturing to China. If you have a war with China, they're not going to sell to us and they won't be able to do it. My answer is, uh, there's sort of like the story where, you know, the two guys running and there's, there's a pair.

And only one guy has to outrun the other. The first thing is the nice part of being the largest consumer for your largest trading partner is if you cut your taps off, it will hurt you a little. It's going to hurt them a lot. Where they're going to get the resources to start to re-industrialize again, right? The Chinese state economy is not known for its efficiency. The second thing is, if we need to, if the West needs to, they can absolutely always reorder very, very quickly. it will be painful, right? Your software engineers who spend maybe 40% of the time working

will be forced to work in some stupid factory that makes javelins, but regardless of the annoyance of it, it will happen. Finally, Dan Wang has the best critique of this. He says that cloud apps don't win wars, and he's right about it. Sub-conductors win wars, and the US has the nice advantage of being the only

and largest ally of Taiwan and you know thing with the US is a lot of its economic potential is put into stock by by stupid regulations zoning nuclear regulations and you know

there's a whole Twitter universe dedicated to expose them not spend time on those the thing is once you get into the once you have Bob's dropping cross London, it'll be very obvious that these things have to go. So, you know, these sort of things are a luxury belief for vested countries.

They can believe in it because, yeah, sucks these guys couldn't get a house in New York, but it's not materially harming us in a way that it's obvious to ones now. I want to start becoming obvious. You know, no elected leader is going to listen to some, is going to listen to the people who are currently harming American or British or German industrial capacity. capacity, they're going to say, sucks about the pollution, but we've got to walk away. So it's

going to rearm very, very quick. And one of the reasons I'm very optimistic about the future is that we have a lot of spare capacity left like this because of stupid rules. And once we started removing those stupid rules, it's just

a rocket takeoff. I'm being animated because it is going to be very animated like that. People fundamentally underrate the benefit of like a liberal-ish democracy which is you can change very quick and not blow up

while doing it. A good historical example is that America had a lot of mess up early in World War too, right? So during the phony war, the phony wall was this sort of like lulled in the 1930s, I'm a 40, I can't remember, in Europe where it was started

fighting, but it sort of wore and it was sort of like a stalemate. This was called a phony war for that reason. And American Congress didn't want America to get involved in because they were isolationists and there's good reasons, right? And FTA wanted to. But once it became clear that American interests in Britain were going to be harmed by it, even the most isolationist Congress members change their mind because of overwhelming public support. So it is going to happen. And the thing is, people just, they're right to assume that the U.S. doesn't have industrial.

capacity but the longer as you'll let it will never have industrial capacity yeah i hope you're right i hope you're right i know i'm right that's that's okay i know i'm right that's okay so you write up earlier that you know we look at the failures of uh we look at the failures of uh you know american military and western military in the middle east but you know we weren't as seriously invested because it didn't directly throw redness. I mean, speaking in the Middle East, um, you, like, our, our occupation in Japan, like, Japan was a country with a hundred million people. It had a very serious and very, like, very, um, like, very proper, you know, like, just a supremely convinced public, uh, that

was like supremely hardcore about the, uh, ideology of, uh, the, uh, imperial way and stuff like that. And you know, this public, um, you, it didn't take that much at all for, you know, the Western, uh, the, the Western occupation to be able to put in a liberal democratic constitution and basically just like turn around the entire trajectory of the country. And whereas we look at countries are way weaker, like, you know, um, Afghanistan has like like, like one, one thousandth of the GDP of America or something like that. And we can't, we can't occupy it, right? So like what was it about Japan or about our military at the time that made it such a successful occupation? You could say, of course, one major factor is that we had Hirohito with somebody they viewed in such a, almost as a deity.

We had him basically surrendering and cooperating and that cons for a lot. But also explained why he wasn't tried as a war criminal afterwards. But yeah, yeah, but is there anything else like, well, why was the occupation in Japan so successful? Okay, I thought a lot about this. There's a great book in this called Embracing Defeat, which you should be, because it's about the exact thing. It's what Japan after World War II and how the Americans did. So why was Japan a lot more successful than Afghanistan?

The first thing is stability is sort of like Lindy, you know. Once you have stability under the relatives, stability again, under the imperial government, they just change the people at the top. You can't really compare it to Afghanistan because there was ski off before. chaos after you aren't solving the root terms of chaos. It's like you have ethnic tensions. In Japan, the thing was there was a lot of stability. People were really tired after what. After when Hirohito had his surrendered rest, a concern among imperial household, the imperial household, the imperial household was that there would be protests ahead of the, outside the palace.

The problem was, I mean, like, that was the most, in there. you, that was the optimal end, that people would be angry with them that they were at the end of the war. The thing was, there weren't no protests. A few people were happy because the war ended. A few people were sad, that they lost. But the Japanese public in general had a very, very difficult war. Fun fact, Japanese GDP per capita in 1937 was only achieved back again in 1952. So you can imagine how bad the Japanese public had it. So in some sense, they were much happier under the Americans.

I mean, it's not a fun fact. It's interesting fact. It's quite a side of it. When the wall was ending, right, there had large scale looting of a Japanese military supply it because they knew food would be scarce for the next few months or so. And so you

had army colonels and majors just stealing food and was completely lawless for a few months to the American military police came and sort of calm things down. The American army in Japan was successful because even the Japanese government was like, yeah, we're going to get done with it. We're going to get back to making Japan late again, again.

And that was the most important. Also, very interesting, not fun, but interesting. MacArthur spoke to Japanese. MacArthur, I don't think he addressed the Japanese public ever, okay? That's very bad. if you're occupying force, they worked through the mechanisms of the previous Japanese government. So also interesting. A lot of Japanese, I think I made this joke on Twitter a while ago. I read Japanese political family. A grandfather was a war criminal, not executed because Hirohito asked Mikado not to.

Father was a finance minister in the 80s. Current kid is number five in the LDP. leadership election. And like the answer is the elite of Japan was not changed after the war. It made it really easy, very convenient to continue. They had this, this mass hallucination that you know, the, uh, what is it? I, I'm blanking on the, on the guys and he had told me made us, made us do it and the, uh, and the, uh, and the in the army made us do it. And just continued with the old elite again, you know, it didn't change much. So you see a lot of these, like, It is also very interesting that elites don't change after revolution. It is not a real appreciated fact, but after the, so this is great paper.

Let me find it. But it basically shows that the Chinese elite in 1980s when the country reformed was the same as Chinese elite in 1920s when the country was having economic growth. The same thing with Japan, in 1960 and 70s, the same family connections made them, you know, were powerful again, right? The next thing is that America didn't really change another really big part of Japan. Japan was occupied, as in its formal structures were changed.

But you would be a little crazy to call it a democracy until like 1990 or something. It was just, Bern Horan has this great post about East Asian industrialization. I think it's a medium, it's quite popular. And one part of it was the Ministry of Industry and There, at MIT, I forgot their full farm. And their policies were basically rubber-stamped by the lower house of the deat.

And, you know, he's like, there wasn't much difference between those guys and the Soviets up north. So, yeah, Japan was a democracy, but it was a democracy. It didn't change much. Right. Yeah, okay. So the fact that the elite to begin with was, I guess, open to Western ideas, It kind of raises the question of why this elite, where was this elite during the 1930s? Many of them were suppressed.

The first Japanese time was the World War II. I'm lying on his name again, but like he was a left-wing leader. And, you know, he's basically going on those, and we, we shouldn't have war, we shouldn't have war. The Japanese equivalent of the girl offering the flower to the American police guy during the Vietnam War. And those guys were obviously suppressed because there's inconvenient for them. But a lot of the, a lot of the Japanese, also interesting, the Japanese Communist Party welcomed the American occupation. So, yeah. So they were seen as the anti-theaters of this.

But Article 9 of Japanese Constitution, which I put to, this is we don't know, it says that Japan counter the armican, roughly, right? It says, it says that the Japanese state gives up war as a means of policy. So that basically like guarantees, not guarantees, but gives the, gave the new elite a good excuse to stop fighting, to stop with that. But the problem is where were those people?

The ideology is fake. It's just what helped them to get them into power. So now it's if fascism helping them get into power, I guarantee you, Hideki, Toji would have become mother Teresa. That, that's not the, the, the, the,

the deal told i don't think many of them really believed in what they in what they did given that they all switched like six months later after 1945 but very hard to make the case there were ideal laws they were just opportunities yeah yeah i'm not sure about that i mean um maybe this is specific to those elites uh but if you look at like the actual soldier class there you cannot question that you you had like ridiculous levels of devotion motion. That's true. Yeah. That's true. But the, but the, but the social class was like sort of like collected out of the Japanese elite. Yeah. Yeah. So I was just thinking about this earlier, which was that one of the reasons, one of the ways you can explain this, um, uh, like why where does all this nationalistic Berger go is that it died of the Pacific, right? Like all, all the most nationalistic people were sent out at the front lines and they were just like massacred in some cases like literally by their own, uh, superior. Like there's there's so many examples where. right um the the the japanese generals just send out there uh as it sent out there's like a useless charge like direct charges with like suicide admissions basically i'm not talking about kamikaze i'm talking about like

diana charges um or like they're going to go down and it just like the defense of okanamo was a great example of that more people died in that than the atom bombings so yeah 150 000 in okina yeah 150 000 people there's almost half the population of Okinawa right yeah yeah yeah so there's like very very blue too there's a great quote of that uh what was his name the guy you know one of those famous uh one of those legends that he was the guy in um one of these at pacific islands and the japanese soldier and he didn't realize japan has surrendered and it was like decades later and he's still like like random civilians because he doesn't know that the japan has surrendered and they like it dropped down leaflets and then like newspapers to like show him that oh you know japan today

this is what it looks like we've surrendered he like he still wouldn't believe it and it's eventually they got him uh they got him back to japan and like later on he wrote a book about it and he's like the reason i didn't believe uh japan could have surrendered is that the motto at the time was that 100 million souls will die for the empire and so um uh uh Japan could not have lost a war because if Japan had lost a war, there would be no Japan, right? Yeah, there would be no Japanese left, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, so why do you think the elites were cynical? Do you think like the elites are generally more cynical when it comes to ideology than the average?

I mean, yeah, it's not like self-selects for that? Because to get the top, you've got to lie and you've got to move around and you've got to be within the things of the day. And yeah, so that's pretty much the main point, which is that the elites knew that they couldn't re-militarize a gear. It's kind of pointless to remilitarized a kid to buy two. And so they just basically decided not to do it. But like, the last 10 minutes is more or less speculation from my part because I have not that into the elite mechanics of Japan before and after World War II to a good level of detail.

right so like my kind of my kind of prior on elites is not that they're not ideological I do agree that often their ideology is cynical but like well if you look at like elites in America for example like I think many of them are like genuinely very well you know like put in all the stuff you can put in the bucket of left wing right but like they genuinely believe those things right like in ways that are even counterproductive to them no but it never gets passed right even they don't pass it like even if you there's probably like one senator who believes that you should nationalize the oil companies, but they never introduce it onto it.

They never make the arguments fall in. They never, I think, like, there are people who are ideologically left-wing. They'll just never stay elected for too long. They'll just, the thing is, the competitive of nature, I mean, to whatever it says, competitive of American democracy, forces you to temper your views.

And the only way to get ahead is you were the public, like, but the oddly defined wants. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so to bring it back to Hirohito, one thing, one thing that I found like very interesting, very confusing, is how this guy got so much

fucking adoration. Because you know, physically, he was not so imposing, interpersonally. He was not that charismatic from what it seems. Like, he just wasn't that communicative. He wasn't like his grandfather, Meiji. There's a actually funny

picture of him on the internet where you can see him next to MacArthur, you know, the general that was in charge of occupying Japan after the war. And you know, like MacArthur is like two feet taller than him. It's like he looks like a midget in comparison to MacArthur. Um, so I don't understand like, how are all these like super right wing militaristic guys, uh, the entire nation really like that they're, they're willing to like die for the empire. You know, I, one of the things that like really made him not like him was, uh,

not like Hirohito was when the book is talking about how these Japanese soldiers are, you know, like the last few years of the war that they knew that Japan was going to lose. The reason that these Japanese soldiers are dying is so that the idea is instead of an unconditional surrender, we'll try to like, we'll try to show the West that we can, we can basically sustain this kind of war for a long time, even if we're going to lose. And so if you want to avoid this, we won't do an unconditional surrender. And the purpose of that was so one of the purposes of that was so that to make sure that it is unconditional, in the conditional surrender, rather, that Hirohito is not tried as a war criminal. Like that's, that's one of the things that these, you know, like these millions of what was it more than a how many, 1.5 million, no, three million Japanese died.

But 1.5 million of Japanese died in the last year of the war. And a lot of them died so that the emperor wouldn't be tried as a war criminal, right? Yeah. Like, I don't know, the idea that he could have stopped the war earlier, or at least potentially could have stopped the war earlier, that he didn't. At these people who are just dying for him in his name. Yeah, the people who aren't dying in his name. There's this great, I don't know, you should read the other book, which is Japan. Let me find.

Japan prepares for, yeah, the book is titled, Japan prepares for Total War, okay? The thing is, nobody thought the emperor was God, he thought it was godlike. But it's easier to imagine for Hindus, I guess. He was a godlike figure. He's not God. And they sort of saw him as their model leader. Right?

The first thing is that they were dying. They went into war because the army paid a lot of money. It was a lot better than being declining Japanese firms at the time quantity by pretty low. So they didn't have much of a thing. They didn't have much of things to do otherwise, you know. Also interesting, the first original, the first public health system in Japan was encouraged by the military because they would saw all their conscripts being so undernourished and ill that they're like, oh, we can't solve this on a military level. We have to have a systemic response to this. Okay.

The second thing is really that why did they die for the? the emperor, a lot of them believed it, and so they died for it. Why did they believe it for such unconvincing persona? Because he was not a politician. He was his persona, his, his stature derived in the fact that he was the descendant of the gods. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it. something else. At this case, something else was, I'm the descendant of the sun goddess. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, isn't that contradict what you said earlier where you said, where you said the worlders didn't believe that he was like a literal deity or the

Yeah, yeah. No, no. He didn't believe. Okay, see, there's a godlike figure and there's a god. So he's a son goddess. Her name starts with A, I forgot it. He's the god, but he's a god-like figure. Right. So you, yeah, but yeah. No, I mean, I understand that. I guess I kind of feel like semantics to me, but it wouldn't be semantics. I mean, if it was semantics, they shouldn't have been happy about the surrender. But many of them weren't, right? No, but a large portion of the Japanese public were just, man, okay, fine, move on now.

which there was a let me put you in like very economic terms there's a there's a reservation prize they have for a god and they have a reservation price

they have for a godlike figure and for the godlike figure the reservation was pretty low it was two years of starvation which for a god two years I mean look at the look at the like they weren't prepared

to find the Americans for very long if you either was a real god figure, they would have been prepared to fight him for the American and British for much longer. Yeah. I guess my point, my original point is that because they believed him to be a godlike figure, they've made many sacrifices for him as an individual person, separate and apart from the sacrifices they made for Japan as a nation.

But he was inseparable from Japan as the nation, right? Right. I mean, which is another thing you can critique, though, right? uh but yeah yeah yeah uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah so like like to make it clear there it would be it would be like they were prepared to make the initial sacrifice first because it was convenient for them to make it you know you they'd have the japanese economy was very very bad across the 30s right and the second thing was it it was sort of like a how did i put it sort of like a not signaling but like quasi signal it i'm willing to fight for the amp but when

The fighting got bad, like, oh, wait, the emperor's not worth that much. It's okay. All right. So, yeah, so let's continue talking about what happened after the war. So you probably know much more about the post-war economy in Japan than I do. I actually know close nothing about it, except for there is the answer, of course, and famously explained why Japan and Germany had growth rates that were so high after the war. And we're able to catch up the results in the best, is his claim.

I mean, bringing back public choice theory, his claim was all these factions that accumulate in democracies were abolished in the war. They basically got a fresh start without all this accumulated a crudge. And because of that, they had extremely high growth rates. And as you know, in the 1980s, there are fears like Japan, this economy would like overtake Americas. And in fact, if they had to have a population collapse, you know, who knows whatever happened. But. Yeah. more or less correct. All the intergroups were destroyed.

And so they could, I mean, actually, all the interscoups were destroyed. They just replaced with better ones. Their Indus groups are bad, but they're good industries and bad intergroups. And it's sort of like the Japanese, the new intergroups in Japan were the bureaucrats who ran the trade industry. I haven't, I know a little about it's not too much, but there are a few big things here, right? One of the problems with the Americans saw in Japan was that, well, there were too many, The biggest interest group was these Zibatsu, the Japanese conglomerates that, like the war, because it gave demand for their goods.

They tried to break them up. And here's where the intersection between that and the new Japanese industrial policy comes. The Americans put sort of like an FTC thing where they said, you know, you can't get too big, and otherwise this commissioner is going to sue you in court, and the court is going to be independent, and the prime minister can't drive the judge and whatever. The thing is the Japanese kept the form of this antitrust law, but just made enough loopholes in it for it to be like, yeah, we have an antitas law and we have a trade commissioner, but nobody enforces it because, you know, it's convenient not to. And then so the Japanese economy changed.

They sort of used these previous Zibatsu. They reformed themselves into Kirtis, which is, you know, probably just a more financialized version of a Zibatsu. And then they, they, they formed themselves into Kirtzus, which is, you know, probably just a more financialized version of a Zibatsu. And then the, for this I don't know, Zabatsu was just this huge conglomerate that emerged in Japan over the 19, the 1900s that was one of the biggest, it was one of the entities that benefited the most from the war because they were mining and industrial war. It was a lot of mining and industry. So they made a lot of money. And the Americans try to break up the Zibatsu, but like almost all the Zaybatsu still exist today in the form of Karetsu. And the Khaditsu guys get really mad when you ask them about it because they don't want to be associated with the rape of Narn King.

They want to be associated with nice Toyota cars. So that's the thing that the Japanese post-war economy was very much influenced by the fact that the Americans were semi-incompetent at breaking down the Zalbatsu. They just re-emerged again. Standard economic growth theory tells you when you have a lot of broken buildings, it's very easy to repair, them back to where you got. So that's where a lot of the initial growth came from. But sorry, maybe you were going there anyways, but there's almost a super compensatory mechanism here where it's like you damage the thing, get more benefit than you would. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So I mean, obviously it is suboptimal. It is obviously worse than

not damaging them. But once you damage them, like it's, it sounds like Bastiatsdiah's broken Windows thing, right if you if you make the b windows it increases consumption and fast yes like but it increases consumption here but you know they're going to spend the money on something else and those guys are right i'm like yeah it's true and the same thing over here obviously i'm making the opposite point then where that the damage counterfactually speaking in the long term the damage actually causes a benefit in the long term because uh you're getting rid of these uh special interest groups that would have um tampered growth for a long time Yeah, probably, but I mean, yes, but also no, because especially in the case in Japan didn't really disappear.

I mean, yes, in the sense that the bad ones went and slightly better ones came up, which is true. But that should not be your main explanation because a lot of Japanese growth in the 50s, which was just catch up. The rebuilding, the broken buildings, and the bomb cities and burnt houses. So partly through is my snob's back check rating. And the other thing is like Japanese industrial policy was very much a feature of the war. Without the war, you wouldn't have had this level of government control of the economy, which led to a higher level of, how I put it, a higher level of planning. I don't think planning is the right word.

It's too many connotations of, basically they got, got export-driven growth because of this, because of you had lots of social capital between the planners and the company executives. It's really easy for them to say, okay, I'll give you a few billion yen. You're going to use this to sell cars in the US. But in three years, if your cars don't sell well enough, you're going to shut down and merge with your rival who will be more successful. So that's one of the drivers of Japanese growth. This one of the reason why the creed so as any industrial policy systems existed. So there's one of the parts of growth after the war.

And also having played with America, just makes you better off for the obvious reason that Americans are rich and they buy a lot of your stuff. Right. Yes. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

This was a very, very interesting. This is extremely interesting. And then, yeah, I'm really glad we did this. I hope we do this with more books because this was actually like a very good way to And you happen to know a lot about the attentionial topic. So this is very usual. I don't know if you feel, is there anything else we're talking about with Russia, Japan and Hirohito?

No, nothing else. I'm probably hitting some edge of my knowledge in like one more question. So let's not go there. Okay. All right. So we're done with that topic. I guess we can talk about a general thing, which is that we're kind of doing similar things, at least for the time being.

I guess you're doing it up uh I guess we're both doing it part-time. So like it you're what's your age? I'm 18 I don't 18 last October. Okay. So I mean how are you structuring your reading writing but podcast? Oh man man. Oh my god. Okay. Okay. So uh mornings in when I travel I get a lot of my Twitter time done right because It's like my biggest source of things that go on. It's not a good source, but it's my good source. So, yeah.

How are I such from my leading? Right now, I think a lot of my leading is I go for deep dives in books. I was doing Japan. So I did Hirohito. I did Ambasing defeat. I read Japan's The First Total War. I read Mark Harrison's The Economics of World War II. Not a very detailed book, but a very good book in terms of the strategic sticks it gives you.

So I'm going to do that. And I'd like to have my stuff to combine the learning data visualization in Python. I'm going to do that with a bunch of World War II economic numbers. So I both like learn how to use the very difficult map plot lab and, you know, this. And that a lot of my reading is ad hoc. I have this set of PDFs I read, which is a lot of I have you just spend staying at my phones. I just, it's second nature. a lot of my writing is a lot more difficult to the structure because, first, because it requires a level of calm that I usually don't get apart from weekends.

So that does much harder. And as for you, question of how do I get my reading? All the usual sources, the listeners of this podcast with no marginal revolution, econ, law. I did a lot of Rohit Krishna and Matt Clifford. I need a lot of, I don't know, Les Don't know, Les Don't know, E.A. Folerman. and actually, quite extent. But really, a lot of my stuff comes from just going to the bibliographies of books I like to read. So that is where a good, luckily, don't pirate books.

Pirating books is bad, but yeah, it's the cheapest way for most people. So basically that. What else? I think being interesting gives me a better sense of ideas. talk to other people. My biggest source of things I could work on is talking to people like you or other people or other things. I also have a lot of time staring at a wall doing nothing because of my work. That gives me a lot of time to contemplate. Finally, I'm applying to college. So I have to, you know, figure out how to legible, how to make my achievements legible to a college admissions person.

So a lot of my time goes around doing that. Yeah. Where you're launching What are my long-term plans? I have no long-term plans. I have a long-term plan to ask me. You're going for computer science. Go to college. Probably. So my next thing is, okay, computer science is a compromise because it's the, I want to do CS, I want to do like econ-related, econ plus like quant-related things. The best end of that in Singapore is computer science plus econ because the government puts a lot of money into computer science and I might as well add econ because it's my interest. So, yes, CF plus E College at NUS is what I'm aiming for.

They already got accepted for CS there. I'll be applying to the UK with my, okay, let me go, let me tell you one thing. For all that I like to criticize America, the British are infinitely worse. So British college courses haven't changed since like 1970 something. In America, you can pick and choose your major in Singapore, you can get a lesser extent. But in Britain, you've had the same courses since 16 to 10. I guess. And the big problem is no course there.

I'm looking for LSC, math, and econ if I can get in and I find a part of money somewhere. Have you not already with the Emergent Ventures Grant? It's like college in the UK costs like $200,000 to support dollars. I deignantly, my wallet in my pocket, I don't have $200,000 to $200,000. For American listeners, that's like $180,000. thousand USD or something on that range. But honestly, I would not be surprised if you were somehow, I'm able to, if you manage some up to a lot of like sponsorships and grants,

yeah, yeah, yeah, enough to like, like, as a thing yourself. So if I was like more into it, I, I would do macroecon and make my newsletter pay. It's, it's kind of obvious. Like, even like 500 bucks a month makes my life super easy. So yeah, but that would be like if, if and when I finish my current, how do I put it, self-imposed military time. Yeah. And what is the topic you're reading about now? I'm doing a bunch of, I mean, I'm not a video about this. I knew my before, but I'm writing about the US dollar reserve system, like a primer.

I tweet about yesterday. It's like, why do countries hold US dollar reserves? And the answer is they hold US dollar reserves because central banks, why did the US dollars are for insurance reasons? Like wait, why does certain banks need US dollars for insurance? The answer is, the US dollar is the main currency used in trade. So it is really, really important to have it in case your currency depreciates too much or appreciates too much. And you can sell it and get USD.

The other reason is that the number one source of financial crises for developing countries in last few years, in the last two decades has been, We need dollars to pay our dollar debts. We don't have enough dollars. So we're broke. And the bank's keep it for that very specific insurance reason of financial crises. And next come the question, well, why can't the remit be or the, the what's normally called the B1, replace this. The answer is nobody use it for trade.

Nobody use it for trade because you can't use it outside China, the capital controls. So like, wait, till China takes out its capital controls, we can't do it. Yeah, pretty much. Next question comes, why can't we use Bitcoin? The answer is you would be very crazy to structure international trade with Bitcoin. You know, it's too volatile. Sorry, next month, your price doubles and your income doubles and their cost doubles.

So it's never going to happen. And most importantly, Bitcoin is a risk asset. You can't use it as insurance. When your NASDAQ falls 10%, Bitcoin falls 25%. The US dollar falls like 1.5% or even goes up. So you can't really do that. That's like my current writing. But as of 2020 at March, it's going to change as in when I find interesting things to write about.

Now, I have a question for you. What is one good thing I should be doing, but I'm not doing? I don't know what you're doing. So I'm not sure. I told you what I'm doing. I'm just writing about it now. Okay. It's all I'm doing.

The answer to that question is probably something I should be doing as well. It sounds like you have been on the side, like just, doing some computer science from what I've talked to separately about. So if you're doing that anyways, yeah, that's fine. One thing that I haven't done enough, but like when I have done it, it's been like super useful. Like it is just that if I just randomly network with people over Twitter or something, if I just like just send them a calendar link or something and you just like learn,

oh, this person is like way more, um, it's just like way more connected than I thought he was. These are super interesting. That has led to some really, really cool things. Super fun, yeah. I have started doing this like one Zoom call a week with like 10 and and weeks before I'm free and make it like five or sevens. It's very, very fun.

More people should do it. It's my cheat code to life. Yeah, yeah. And what is one thing I should be doing that I'm not doing? I think you should scale this up very much. What is your estimate of your impact? why a podcast versus writing? Roughly zero both ways.

By impact, do you mean the audience or? Yeah, I mean like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like like you think your podcast gives you more impact or your writing. I mean I think they're both like zero impact as far as like impact doesn't I don't know like improving the world in some way. No. I mean impact on you like a very crude approximation is views.

Um, for for time spent like how much I'm learning. and so on. I think writing, probably I'm learning more than I'm doing learning podcasting. I think it depends on the guest. So what did you mean when you said scale it up a way more?

Okay. What would a self-sustaining Lunar Society podcast look like? Self-sustaining meaning like... You could work on this full-time without any outside capital. It would have to be way more regular and it would have to be way more broadly

appealing. Yeah, that sucks because godly appealing stuff is almost always dumbed down. So like nobody can do godly appealing. So yeah. My friend just recently discussing this, like you know Lex Freeman's podcast. Yeah. Um, like he's clearly three-star guy, but, uh, at least in his, whatever is that research area is like, he must be right. Or at least I'm told so, uh, but, um, but yeah, you can clearly see, uh, that, uh, that, uh, you, uh, to reach his million subscribers or whatever. And this is not to just like,

this is not just to take copium by the spoonful, but there is a little, but I mean, by definition to appeal to the majority of the population, you have to appeal to midwits, right? By definition of what a midwit is. And there are exceptions to this, right? Like, for example,

there's conversation with Tyler, which actually does appeal to a lot of people, and it's not midwitted. That's right. But he started off with a lot of social capsules. So you can't compare that. No, that's true. That's true.

Like, in my case, it ended up being the case that the money you make, like, you make, I code like start a Patreon or something, but it would be like so much less money than just like random grants people offer you. Yeah. Which is like very nice of, extremely, extremely nice of them. And I'm very grateful for it. And then like, and that is like that orders of magnitude more than I could make if I had a Patreon. You know what I mean? Yeah.

No, no, I agree. I think an easier way of this is I'm going to plug in my friend Chris Koocham here, who has this very cool thing called a learning public offerings, where you tell people, I'm going to learn about this. And six months later, I will teach you everything you need to know about this. And I'll have Zoom calls with you. I'll give you an NFT or wherever your preferred model is. and you basically say you pay me enough money to cover some part of my expenses now

and we care and six months later i'll teach you everything you need to know and if it's popular enough you'd probably do that it's like open source should work like it doesn't but it's so it's like a model of how these things should work and another easier way is to have it's a it's a pretty easy if you do own the econ like i do where i can just have an econ on newslet and focusing on normy things like where will the industries go next month and what does that mean for stocks and have a better user doing things i like to do so very uh i know how to put it the other thing like more people might emerge image is an application like the thing that found most strong about more people should do company level analyses so i am because it one it pays and two because it's underrated by econs and overrated by stock people and i consider you're very much in war econ that stock person.

So yeah, I think it's very, very useful to sort of like commercialize it, come down, class subsidize your intellectual pursuits by the commercial part. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. I think the thing is I don't think I want to do the intellectual pursuits thing as a main thing for my career. So it's not, and I don't need like a lot of money. It's not like I'm, you know, I need to make the rent this month or something. So I think it would just make more sense for me to like not worry that much about monetization of this kind of stuff.

And then just make my money as a software engineer or like whatever else I decided to do, right? Who? Yeah. So, but there's a separate question about. like having big because I think the much harder question is like how do you actually be a good public intellectual right public intellectual is like a kind of cringe word to use but you know what I mean right like how do you have yeah put produce content that's original and interesting especially when you're young

like us where you don't have that much life experience or just general knowledge about the world public in intellectual is strange but but top leader is worse yeah you didn't do or use that yeah you The first thing is if you do a bad job, you'll come to know pretty obviously. Like, every time my mind is bad, it gets like low engagement. People are like, yeah, it's man. I'm like, oh, that sucks. But you come to know that, obviously.

The second thing is to have a circle of competence and be graded. So you can be, I have a, I have a friend who's friend of the guy who's ex who's the ex, you know who's Zoltan post are. Do you? Hmm? He's a former New York fed guy. who works at, I don't know, it's with a Dodge Bank now,

where he knows every single thing about Fed plumbing. So how do access reserve gets, get transported, where how did the bonds deals happen, et cetera, et cetera. It was every single thing about that. And if you want to be a good public intellectual, public, whatever your placement for that word is, we be very great at one thing

and draw on your credibility from there. It's not very hot. If you're coding, it is very easy to demonstrate your competent something. Just build something cool. And people are like, oh, this is really interesting. You're super void. But if you are lighting or speaking, it is much harder. It is obviously an open problem.

But I mean, a podcast is like one way of demonstrating your good at it because people, you, people whom other people respect, say, oh, I like, I like, oh, super cool. But the other, like, you have to basically somehow build a. proof of work and show it to people. My answer to that is doing econ stuff people like and at some point of time, if possible, monetize it, which only works if you think is commercially oriented. So I can't do a history of the gold standard. That sucks. Yeah, yeah.

And, but even, like, the proof of work thing, I, I mean, you could say that the proof of work is like the amount of engagement to get, but I've noticed. in like things that've gotten a lot of engagement on, even when it's like on a specific topic, like, for example, I have like some post on like talent that got some attention, right? Right. On like spotting talent.

And I, I could tell you that I, I know less about spotting talent than like the median manager or the Best Buy, right? I know close to nothing about, uh, finding talent. And you know, you can have blog posts to get a tent. I'm not saying that like, you know, they got viral in anything. But they did get like, one of them was on the marginal revolution. Right. And so like, that's another thing that kind of makes you skeptical about the value of

being a public intellectual in the first place is that like I actually generally don't know anything about practically identifying talent but then you can get you can like just put out these like sort of inside foreign things and you get that get attention and I don't know what kind of value that's generating for the world or you know what I mean no I agree but I also joke to my friends that that that among our circle I'm the best at evaluating talent because all my tutor mutuals end up getting famous so like Yeah. So, like, on the object level issue, it doesn't matter because you're not, you know, you're not selling your fish to fish. You're selling it to fishermen. But on the meta level, the thing with writing about, about, about like these sort of general things is that nobody knows how to do it unless you have 30 years of experience. So, like, don't worry about. If they liked it, you can do it.

Okay? The second thing is people are not appreciating your object level thing on talent. That's okay. Nobody's going to make you the head of McKinsey's recruiting thing. There's a very big difference in knowing something, in doing something, and being able to explain it. And you're like, it's okay. Your post on talent or like anything you write about, about the barbell, strategy. The value you provide the people is not a

probable strategy. It is explaining it in ways they can understand. I'm sure they knew it, right? Everyone has the idea that like this month I'm going to be super fit and next six months I'm going to do nothing. Everybody has that those things. But the point is giving it some sort of form and structure. Yeah. You know, it's kind of funny on that post particular because it was just like hanging out at my Google Drive. I think I had burned it, like, a few weeks or months ago. It was just like, almost like a throwaway thing.

Oh, yeah. These things could seem kind of like barbell strategies. And then, and it would compare to like other bad posts where I've like put in way more effort, it was just, it was literally just kind of a throwaway, right? But then, but then Alex, yeah. Yeah, he says something very nice by my blog. But he, but he used that blog post as like the thing to retweet to like say the nice thing of a bump the blog.

And then now this, this like random blog post has like, 150 likes or something. And it was just like your throwaway thing, right? Like a load of And these other ones are like spent a lot more effort on there like five likes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, I applied to visit. He said, uh, you know the blogger by the way, applied to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he had a similar point where he's like talking about, um, he just goes through like how many subscribers he has, a graph and he's like, you see these big jumps. They're not like posts. They're not like post I spend a lot of effort on or something. They're just posts that happen to get featured on MR.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Uh, yeah. Yeah, uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Yeah, like my answer, like, I shouldn't be worrying too much about distribution. The question is if you, is it like, one part of me is like, oh, maybe I could, I, because every single time I need financial news, I'm like, no, I could improve on this. I could, I could, I could do a 5x better job at explaining this. Because I know a lot of financial jobs and they're like, yeah, the job requires me to dump things down. I'm like, no, you could do an intelligent one.

I'm like, yeah. So every time I see these sort of things, I realize that you have. have a pretty clear data between writing. I put it in a different way. When you grow on the internet, your audience shapes you as much as you shape them. So it is important not to write too many stupid things that go viral because you will be incentivized to write stupid things that go viral. You have to play that that beta game of not writing stupid viral things.

And so like I refuse sometimes to write about popular things because I don't want to, I don't want it to go idle. It is a, it is a liability than an asset because it's going to be stupid. And I'm going to be known as the guy who did this, which is like, people say I'm a long bug because to say, you know, any, any attention is good attention or something like that. But I'm like, no, you've got to be knowing for the right thing. So I don't know how to deal with it. I deal with it with forcing myself and not put stupid things that go well. Your parallel strategy post wasn't stupid things that went well. But I know that. that you know that you can let stupid things that go viral.

Don't do it. I've done it myself. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't go viral exactly, but they were stupid. They ended up being a little more popular than my more thoughtful things. Yeah. So what is your long-term plans as far as the intellectual stuff goes?

Like are you planning on keeping up the blog and podcast? Yeah, my mom. Yes, yes. At least for next two years, at least in August 2023, I will keep doing this. And then it's like, I'll be in college then. It depends on the amount of the amount of free time I have. I'll probably keep it because it's my only way of socializing with people. So, yeah, it better stay.

Yeah, yeah. You have, like, a surprising amount of leeway in, like, I guess in my experience in like at least U.S. college, it's just like, if you want to spend like 60 hours a week on your college work, you can. If you want to spend 20 hours, you can. And the difference is not going to be, or, maybe there's maybe a smaller gradient but there's waste of compress the amount of time you have to spend on college you can work out of the other stuff yeah that's true i don't know i want to go

to the uk for the fact that one you have pretty short terms a lot more free time and two i find it very humiliating to describe my entire life story to get into college i'm sorry please just just just ask me why do math and and then and let me in right no no they're asking you you to be cynical. And when they asked, it was like, that, you know, made questions about like, oh, well, yeah, to tell us about what led you to this point in life, where are you applying here and what is your life story? It's like, what? The honest answer is you have a lot of, you have a strong credential and I want that strong credential, right? The answer is I like money. So here, here we go.

Like, yeah, I know. Yeah. That says, I like money and you're my nicest past, you're getting that and nobody likes that. And so I don't like these selection. effect of selecting for people who can lie well. So it's not going to end up well. Yeah. Yeah. So like on a model level, I refuse to engage it. Well, did you not apply?

Like, what did you do for those kinds of questions? I'm going to apply this September, so I'll find out. Yeah. Yeah. But also, like, I optimized my life in high school for doing things I like. I was a guy who was in lunch sitting in the corner with six books and I let six books a week. let's six books a week. I wish I'd done that.

In middle school, my mom was convinced I needed to become an Eagle Scout or become a Boy Scout in order to like Yeah, I know. I'm like, I pretty much fanned off all those kids. I can't play a tubble. I can't play the piano. I've probably,

my muscles. Please, no, no, no. Just being incompetent at anything else is a good to untail keeping your time. Right. Yeah. No, I, because I, like,

what you ended up doing in high school, I ended up doing in college. Basically, you had like a three or four year. I'm 21, year 18. So three year advantage on me in terms of this up, right? Yeah. Which I wish I'd just done earlier. Now, that's okay.

You have a lot of time. A lot more, they have longevity words. Yes, yes. Let's hope for that. Yeah. I'm not sure if we was taking some kind of drug right now, like metformin or something. Yeah. I think of that, but it's like kind of awkward and justified to a pharmacy.

They're like, this is controlled. I'm like, yeah, I know. Like, do you have diabetes? Not exactly. What do you want it? Why do they say in time that he takes it? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's okay. My answer is just run a lot and do weights and eat healthy and whatever. Right, which I think I'm doing to at least some sort of reasonable accent. Yeah, dude, this was really interesting and fun. I mean, if there's a I'll keep track on your Twitter and see what you're reading. And if another title comes up that I find interesting, maybe we can do this again.

Oh yeah, definitely. I love to do it. Yep, yep. Awesome, man. Thanks a lot for your time. See you. See you, bye. Yeah, oh, hey, hold up.

Sorry, where we go, just to plug your stuff again. So you're on Twitter, your handle, and obviously this will be in the description. Yeah, it's at Pradu Pasad. Okay. And then with the P, both P's capital. I mean, it doesn't matter. doesn't okay I didn't know that and then and then the bread and goods that's with two t's that sub spec.com and the same name for the bread and goods podcast yeah

yeah and you you've had some pretty notable guest on right so Matt Clifford burn Hobart yeah definitely we're checking out highly recommend thank you so much yeah awesome man yeah thanks for time thank you bye